ICYMI: Josh Hawley Blames Sexual Revolution for Sex Trafficking

FILE – In this June 21, 2017 file photo, Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley speaks at a news conference in St. Louis. Missouri Republicans are coalescing around Hawley as their favored candidate to challenge veteran Democratic U.S. Sen. Clair McCaskill in 2018, which would set up a marquee contest between a wily incumbent and a fresh-faced political newcomer in a state that has trended conservative. (AP Photo/Jim Salter File)

Yesterday, it was reported that in a speech to the Missouri Renewal Project in December, Josh Hawley blamed sex trafficking on the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

…During a speech at a “Pastors and Pews” event hosted by the Missouri Renewal Project, Hawley tied the issue to the sexual revolution, the cultural shift in the 1960s and 1970s that eliminated the social stigma for premarital sex and contraception that had been commonplace in the United States.

“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined,” Hawley told the crowd in audio obtained by The Star this week.

“We must … deliver a message to our culture that the false gospel of ‘anything goes’ ends in this road of slavery. It ends in the slavery and the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It ends in the slavery and exploitation of young women.”

Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, an expert on human trafficking who has advised law enforcement and testified in criminal cases across the country, said there is “absolutely no empirical evidence or research to suggest there was any uptick in human trafficking in the 1960s or 70s or that that’s when it started.”

…The Missouri Renewal Project is an affiliate of the national American Renewal Project, a group that works to politically engage conservative Christians. The national project did not respond for a request for comment.

Hawley’s campaign spokeswoman, Kelli Ford, said the candidate’s comments about the links between trafficking and the sexual revolution do not need clarification.

A week after one Republican U.S. Senate candidate from Missouri called feminists “career-obsessed banshees” with “snake-filled heads,” audio has emerged of another one blaming modern sex trafficking on the sexual revolution — the cultural movement of half a century ago that ushered in accessible birth control, divorce law reforms and other advances for women.

“You know what I’m talking about, the 1960s, 1970s, it became commonplace in our culture among our cultural elites, Hollywood, and the media, to talk about, to denigrate the biblical truth about husband and wife, man and woman,” Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley said during a speech to pastors in Kansas City in December, according to an audio obtained by the Kansas City Star and posted on Wednesday.“[W]e’re living now with the terrible after-effects of this so-called revolution, which was in fact I think a great step back,” Hawley says in the audio. “And one of them is, one of those effects, is a crisis in our country that goes by the name of human trafficking.”
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Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley is drawing attention after a report that he told a gathering of pastors last month that sex trafficking is linked to the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

The Kansas City Star reported Wednesday that it had obtained audio from a speech Hawley gave in December at a “Pastors and Pews” event in Kansas City hosted by the Missouri Renewal Project. The Missouri group is an affiliate of the American Renewal Project that works to politically engage conservative Christians.“The 1960s, 1970s, it became commonplace in our culture among our cultural elites, Hollywood, and the media, to talk about, to denigrate the biblical truth about husband and wife, man and woman,” Hawley is recorded telling the pastors.

…The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s was a period when society became more permissive of pre-marital sex, use of birth control pills, and non-married couples living together, signaling a shift from the more conservative 1950s.

…Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco, an expert on human trafficking who has advised law enforcement and testified in criminal cases across the country, told The Star there is no empirical evidence or research to suggest an increase in trafficking during the 1960s or 70s. She said sex trafficking has been a problem since the nation’s founding.

Attorney General Josh Hawley is being forced to defend his comments on sex trafficking, an issue that has been a focus of his time in Missouri office.

…Hawley’s campaign later uploaded Hawley’s speech to YouTube and noted that his speech aired on the Bott Radio Network earlier in January. However, the section in which Hawley connects the changes in American attitudes about sex in the 1960s and 1970s to a practice he has called “modern-day slavery” appears to have been edited out of the Christian radio network’s broadcast.

…”I didn’t go to one of those fancy private schools, but the history I learned in public schools & Mizzou taught me that the evidence of trafficking of women for sex goes back to before 2000 BC,” [Claire] McCaskill said. “It didn’t begin with women’s rights and the birth control pill.”

…”If my (GOP) Senate primary opponents could stop writing (McCaskill’s) fundraising ads for her, that’d be great,” said Austin Petersen, a former Libertarian presidential candidate now running as a Republican. He added: “These comments do nothing but foster a Todd Akin-style culture war that the GOP will lose to a formidable female incumbent.”